Free Image of the Beast and Blown by Philip José Farmer

Society and open the front door, and tons of books,
magazines, documents, photographs, and bric-a-brac
would cascade out, and the rescuers would tunnel down to
find Woolston Heepish pressed fiat between the leaves of The Castle of Otranto.
    Childe was led into an enclosed back porch, jammed
with books like the other rooms. They stepped out the
    back door into a pale green light and an instant sensation
as of diluted sulphuric acid fumes scraping the eyes. Childe
blinked, and his eyes began to run. He coughed. Heepish
coughed.
    Heepish said, "Perhaps we should pass up the grand
tour of the garage, but…"
    His voice trailed off. Childe had stopped for a moment;
Heepish was a figure as dark and bulky and shapeless as
a monster in the watery mists of a grade-B movie.
    The door squeaked upward. Childe hastened to enter
the garage. The door squeaked down and clanged shut.
Childe wondered if this door, too, were connected to a re-
cording taken from the old Inner Sanctum radio program.
Heepish turned on the lights. More of the same except
that there was dust on the heads, masks, books, and maga-
zines.
    "I keep my duplicates, second-rate things, and stuff I just
don't have room for in the house at the moment," Heep-
ish said. Childe felt that he was expected to ejaculate over
at least a few items. He wanted to get out of the hot,
close, and dead air into the house. He hoped that the files
he wanted were not stored here.
    Childe commented on an entire bookshelf dedicated to
the works of D. Nimming Rodder.
    Heepish said, "Oh, you noticed that he is the only liv-
ing author with an individual placard in my collection in
the house? Nim is my favorite, of course, I think he's the
greatest writer of all time, in the Gothic or horror genre,
even greater than Monk Lewis or H. P. Lovecraft or Bram
Stoker. He is a very good friend of mine.
    "I keep many duplicates of his works out here because
he needs one now and then to use as tearsheets or refer-
ence for a new anthology. He has had many anthologies,
you know, just scads of reprints and collections taken from
his collections, and collections from these. He's probably
the most recollected man on Earth."
    Childe did not smile. Heepish shrugged.
    There was a large blow-up of Rodder tacked to an up-
right. In heavy black ink below: TO MY FIRST FAN
AND A GREAT FRIEND, MISTER HORROR HIM-
SELF, WITH INTENSE AFFECTION FROM NIM.
The thin, pale face with the collapsed cheeks, sharp nose,
and the huge-rimmed spectacles looked like that of a
    spooky and spooked primate of the Madagascar jungle,
like a lemur's. And lemur, now that Childe considered it,
originally meant a ghost. He grinned. He remembered
the entry in the big unabridged dictionary he had referred
to so often at college.
    Lemur—Latin lemures nocturnal spirits, ghosts; akin to
Greek lamia, a devouring monster, lamas crop, maw, lamia, pl., chasm, Lettish lamata mousetrap; basic idea: open
jaws.

7
     
     
    Childe, looking at Rodder's photograph, grinned
widely.
    Heepish said, "What's so funny? I could stand a little
laugh in these trying times."
    "Nothing, really."
    "Don't you like Rodder?"
    Heepish's voice was controlled, but it contained a hint
of a well-oiled mousetrap aching to snap shut.
    Childe said, "I liked his Shadow Land series. And
I liked his underlying themes, aside from the spooky
element. You know, the little man fighting bravely
against conformity, authoritarianism, vast forces of cor-
ruption, and so on, the lone individual, the only honest
man in the world—I liked those things. And every time
I read an article in the newspapers about Rodder, he's
always described as honest, as a man of integrity. Which
is really ironic."
    Childe stopped and then, not wishing to continue but
impelled to, said, "But I know a guy …"
    He stopped. Why tell Heepish that the guy was Jere-
miah?
    "This guy was at a party which consisted mainly of
science-fiction people. He was standing within earshot of
a group of authors. One was the great